Friday, March 30, 2012

Why Life Expectancy Will Crash in the United States

It's coming. It will take some time before it shows up in the stats, but the socialization of medicine is going to have a dramatic impact on medical care---for the worse.

It doesn't matter what the Supremes rule on Obamacare. If they rule against it, it will just slow things down, but socialist thinking surrounds the medical industry, especially among the "big thinkers", the interventionist minded, central planning focused bioethisists.

Bioethics is a phony science, recently concocted by busybodies working for pharmaceutical companies, governments, and medical institutions looking for excuses to justify what they have already decided to do. That's dangerous enough, but these are not just fools sowing confusion, they are mostly of a particular mindset – that is to say, they are a bunch of collectivists and statists – who pretend to be objective. Worse, they espouse policies with wide-reaching implications, almost universally wrong-headed and disastrous, which are a reeking part of the rotting fabric of what was once American society.

I don't know where they dig up these people – how can anyone be so corrupt, blind, and stupid at the same time, and still manage to tie his shoes in the morning? These people are like the TSA of the intellectual world. They are worse than useless; they are counterproductive, making people more confused on ethical matters, thereby making the world more dangerous. They hide under rocks and in sub-cellars in stable and happy times. But given an opening, they come out, and you have an infestation that's extremely hard to expunge. The kind of people who join the TSA are one species, but bioethicists are even worse....

We're dealing with fundamental issues of good and evil here; I urge everyone to read my article on the ascendancy of sociopaths in US governance. Essentially, the powers of darkness have gotten the upper hand almost everywhere, and we're looking at a dystopian future, where 1984 might be used as an instructional manual.

But what really gets me about these bioethicists is that they are not technical experts contributing to debates among scientists – they're just a bunch of busybodies who want to tell everyone else what to do, based on their own opinions of morality and notions of political correctness. This is especially dangerous, because people make decisions and act based on their ideas of what is right and wrong – on moral grounds. By setting themselves up as the great determiners of what is ethically correct, these supposed experts become a sort of new secular priesthood to guide us all. They're worse than run-of-the-mill busybodies, however; they want to play the role of Gríma Wormtongue in counseling rulers. They are generally sociopaths who want us to accept their statist, collectivist ethics, and thereby exert control over the direction of society, taking it down paths they deem best...

Fortunately, few people listen to bioethicists. But unfortunately, those who do tend to be among those battling for control of public policy. These so-called ethical experts insinuate themselves into the bureaucratic machinery of the state, into the flow of intellectual and academic debate, into the course material taught at universities, and they exert influence.

It's especially dangerous because when people read about a consensus of Ph.D.s agreeing that X or Y is ethical, they may be seduced into letting these others do their ethical thinking for them, instead of holding on to the vital responsibility of thinking through ethical matters for themselves...

Individual responsibility, rather than diffuse responsibility among classes of people, is a major reason for the individual accomplishments and innovations that led the West to global eminence. Bioethicists are trying to set themselves up as a new priesthood. If they succeed, it would reverse an essential element of Western thought. These people are termites eating at the foundations of Western civilization and are contributing to the West's fall from eminence.

Bioethicists are irksome because they're a visible cutting edge of the knife destroying our social fabric, and yet they are given unearned respect and material prosperity....

Yes, you're exactly right. Needless to say, he conflates healthcare with medical care, which are two totally different things. But beyond that, this luminary actually says that technology "is one of the barriers to an equitable and sustainable healthcare system." Why? It "drives up costs with little return on investment."...

You have to see clearly what he's saying. He didn't say technology was a barrier to effective medical treatment, he said it's a barrier to an "equitable and sustainable healthcare system." He doesn't give a fig if you or I live or die, it's the system – the collective – that matters most to him and all his socialist ilk. This is classic. These frauds are not experts in ethics at all, but socialists using big words that sound scientific and objective to con people into buying their collectivist values.

The collectivist mindset is a pathology. The socialists have been discredited with the collapse of the USSR...

. So, they've migrated from economics to "ecology," where they have become "watermelons" – green on the outside, red on the inside. And they've redoubled their efforts to capture the legal and academic arenas. Bioethics offers a chance to do that, plus corrupt science, plus gain the high moral ground. It's a wonderful scam. And if these people are good at anything – actually it's the only thing they're good at – it's perpetrating a scam...

These lickspittle pseudointellectuals are on their way to becoming a leading cause of death in the US and elsewhere. They are metastasizing into a giant force for government control of science and suppression of "unsustainable" research not aligned with the goals of those in power. Instead of allowing innovators to create new treatments wherever new ideas take them, we could end up with pseudoscience following a course of research set by the dominant political agenda of the day.

It should not be up to lunatic busybodies like this Callahan to tell people how much they can spend trying to keep themselves alive; it should be up to individuals. If some people can afford expensive new treatments, bully for them. If some people can't, they are no worse off than they were before the new treatment was invented. Nobody gets out of here alive. But of course, to a socialist this is a big problem, because in that view, everyone should have equal and unlimited access to all treatments. In this perverted view of things, it doesn't matter if an expensive treatment is better, it doesn't matter that rich people who pay for new treatments open the path for less expensive and better treatments in the future – it matters only that the system cannot afford to provide something for everyone now. This only shows that the man is not an expert in medical technology, nor economics, and especially not ethics...

Far be it from me to defend a Republican argument, but there's something to what they say about "death panels." If you socialize medicine, who will determine what treatments are allowed? What treatments are within budget? There will have to be panels of supposed experts – like these bioethicists – who will literally have the power of life and death in their hands.

The only hope Casey sees is that creative medical care will move and develop offshore:

Of course what's going to happen is that medical entrepreneurs will not just locate to a different state but to a different country, where they can develop products freely and cheaply. And more and more Americans will go elsewhere for medical care. Even more will renounce their citizenships and go elsewhere to avoid everything from being forced to buy medical insurance to being forced to support the Welfare-Warfare State in general.

Nominating Kim is about promoting socialized medicine globally. It is about preventing pockets of free market medical care to develop offshore. The evil bastards really want to take over the world. If they succeed, it will crush economies, crush standards of living and crush life expectancy.

3 comments:

In any industry exhibiting any market tendencies, first-mover technology is purchased by corporations, the rich and fervent niche players until product innovation and growing volume drives the price down. For a universal example, consider the huge monstrosity of a cell phone used in the movie Wall St., affordable only by a few.

Healthcare does not experience this curve, where technology drives the price down, because the government controls supply and demand, as well as regulating delivery so specifically there is virtually no process innovation either. Health care could easily cost 200% of what a market in it would deliver.

Now, since socialized health care is bankrupting nations, the answer is MORE regulation, and a total withdrawal from innovation. Brilliant. We are all Luddites now.

I love how Progressives and socialists end up proposing more policies to fix market distorting policies already in place.

Following the Constitution would be such a massive improvement-- how wonderful it would be if we followed it and were discussing a move back to the Articles of Confederation. Boy would society be healthy if we were at that intellectual/belief stage. Robert Higgs is correct (I'm paraphrasing him): people are far from perfect, but we don't need government institutionalizing these imperfections.